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And this inner vision, what is its operation?
Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate
splendour. Therefore the Soul must be trained- to the habit of
remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty
produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men
known for their goodness: lastly, you must search the souls of
those that have shaped these beautiful forms.
But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its
loveliness?
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself
beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be
made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes
this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has
grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is
excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all
that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never
cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you
from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the
perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.
When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you
are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now
remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without
clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true
to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which
is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form
nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable
as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity-
when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become
very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet
a step- you need a guide no longer- strain, and see.
This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that
adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and
unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness,
then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain
to sight before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted
to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did
eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can
the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be
beautiful.
Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who
cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come
first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful
Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the
Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else,
but the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is
beyond the Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be the nature of
Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the
Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful: if we
make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty
of the Intellectual Sphere; and The Good, which lies beyond, is
the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and
the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always,
Beauty's seat is There.
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